Malawi

Malawi

The Malawi Country Guide was produced by the Danish Institute for Human Rights (DIHR) and Citizens for Justice Malawi (CFJ).

The Country Guide is a compilation of publicly available information from international institutions, local NGOs, governmental agencies, businesses, media and universities, among others. International and domestic sources are identified on the basis of their expertise and relevance to the Malawian context, as well as their timeliness and impartiality.

The initial survey of publicly available, international sources was carried out by DIHR from January to December 2014. The draft was then updated and localized by CFJ from January to March 2015.

The completed Country Guide aims to provide a comprehensive overview, on the basis of the information available, of the ways in which companies do or may impact human rights in Malawi. The current Country Guide is not meant as an end product, or a final determination of country conditions. It is intended to be the basis, and the beginning, of a process of dissemination, uptake and modification. DIHR and PILER seek further engagement with local stakeholders, and intend to update the Country Guide on that basis.

News Feed

17 Aug 2017 — "How might the Malawi government fail to secure a fair share of natural resource wealth?"
‘Is the deal a good deal?’ is a question often asked about the agreement signed between Paladin and the government for Kayelekera uranium mine. Reductions in royalty rates and other tax incentives have come under public scrutiny, while the company and government argue that these were necessary for the project to go ahead.
In Malawi, negotiating tax terms has been the norm to date for mining and petroleum contracts. The amendments to the Taxation Act passed last year address this for solid minerals by fixing tax rates. This was done in an effort to protect future potential revenues from the sector. However, reduced tax rates are not the only way a government can lose revenue. Revenue can be lost through erosion of the tax base against which tax rates are applied...
It also goes without saying that strengthening tax administration is vital, but an imbalance in expertise between companies and government ‘will remain, for the foreseeable future, between the lawyers and accountants’. And it may be wiser to change the balance between profit-based and production-based taxes to the latter, which have fewer associated revenue risks. Finally, project-level revenue analysis, using public disclosures, is the most effective way to understand payment to government through ‘taking into account project production and project costs, the sale value of the commodity and the applicable fiscal terms’. The report is a reminder for the government to look beyond revisions to tax rates to ways to address the erosion of the tax base because ‘tax rates are meaningless in the absence of the tax base against which they are assessed. Put simply, whether the corporate income tax is 25 or 35 percent is irrelevant if companies report no taxable income’.

2 Aug 2017 — "Loss of Fertile Land Fuels ‘Looming Crisis’ Across Africa"
...Africa itself has a land problem. The continent seems so vast and the land so open. The awesome sense of space is an inextricable part of the beauty here — the unadulterated vistas, the endless land. But in a way, that is an illusion. Population swells, climate change, soil degradation, erosion, poaching, global food prices and even the benefits of affluence are exerting incredible pressure on African land. They are fueling conflicts across the continent...
Private investors are tramping in as well. Since the 1990-2005 period, global food prices have increased by 50 to 75 percent. Many foreign companies and local businesspeople have speculated that despite soil degradation, African farmland is destined to become more valuable. Small landholders across the continent are increasingly getting priced out or even evicted to make way for big commercial farms. This has led to conflict even in usually peaceful places, like Malawi, where a land-defense movement recently started to fight back against foreign-owned tea plantations.
Farmland is also rapidly vanishing into housing tracts and shopping centers to serve Africa’s growing and more affluent population. This is happening everywhere: quiet fields’ suddenly being transformed by an army of tractors into a set of neat houses or a colossal mall.

19 Jun 2017 — Malawi has submitted its first Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative report was submitted to the Multi-Stakeholder Group. The report relates to the period from 1 July 2014 to 30 June 2015, and covers oil, mining and forestry sectors.

12 May 2017 — “Media outreach campaign minimises land grabbing”
In 2009 the government of Malawi started promoting commercial agriculture and supporting the acquisition of land on behalf of investors interested in conducting large-scale farming. This took place profusely in areas such as the Chikhwawa and Nkhotakota districts along the Shire River and Lake Malawi respectively, whose soils are fertile and conducive particularly to sugarcane cultivation. As a result of this, pressure on land in these areas increased massively, leading to elites scrambling for land in these areas to benefit from financially…This trickled down to the village level, and manifested itself in local chiefs using their power to grab land from members of their communities, and selling the land to investors and elites. This became a major problem as entire communities, in losing their land, lost their livelihood.
LandNet Malawi collaborated with eight media houses…to launch a media campaign and raise awareness nationally on this situation. Together, they visited the affected areas to hear the villagers’ accounts with regards to what happened to their land, and also to find out what was being done in response to the challenges they were facing.

12 May 2017 — In Chikhwawa and Nkhotakota Districts in Malawi, there have been grave reports of land grabbing and land related conflict due to the expansion of sugarcane cultivation. LandNet Malawi conducted a successful media campaign resulting in the minimisation of land grabbing and dispossession of inhabitants of their land.

8 May 2017 — This pilot study provides a barometer of mineral governance in ten Southern African countries: Botswana, Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The barometer takes stock of mining regulations in place at the end of 2015, the extent to which they are implemented, and features of supporting institutions. It is based on the observation that while regulations impose obligations on mining companies, in doing so they directly impose obligations on the state to monitor and enforce compliance, and they also indirectly impose obligations for citizens and civil society to hold the state and mining companies accountable. The barometer includes indicators of mineral governance across four main issue-areas: national economic and fiscal linkages; community impact; labour, and the environment, with artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) treated as a special topic. The barometer also includes indicators of state capacity and state accountability with respect to mineral governance...